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JANUARY 2006:

January 2006 [issue date]: Helen Greiner - Entrepreneur of the Year. By Patricia Greco. Good Housekeeping. "While studying computer science and mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Helen Greiner would often tell her mother about robots made for space exploration. 'That's great, honey,' her mom would say, 'but what I really want is a robot that can clean hard-to-reach places.' Greiner, 38, delivered on her mom's request. As cofounder and chairwoman of iRobot, she helped develop the Roomba...."
>>> Household Appliances, Robots, Applications
-> back to headlines

DECEMBER 2005

December 12, 2005 [issue date]: Get Smart. By Susan Karlin. Forbes.com (registration req'd.). "After a half-century of hostile borders and urban guerrilla warfare, Israel has emerged as the go-to country for antiterrorism technologies. Here's the latest crop. ... Israeli exports of homeland security equipment will hit $300 million this year, up 22% per year since 2002, estimates [Dan] Inbar. The global trade in antiterror gear and consulting services is expected to grow from $46 billion to $178 billion by 2015. (The U.S. accounts for half.) ... ... The Invisible Fence (Price: $20,000 to $300,000) Attendees at the 2004 Olympics in Athens were watched--and monitored--by cameras enhanced with artificial intelligence, made by Controp Precision Technologies. The cameras can distinguish humans from other moving objects and lock on their subjects, day or night. Guards will get an alert and can switch to manual mode and zoom in on the target. ... Liar Detector (Price: $200,000) An airport security guard's greatest fear is letting through terrorists smart enough to stay off the watch list. Suspect Detection Systems came up with a machine to smoke them out. A passenger puts his passport on a scanner and one hand on a sensor. The machine starts asking increasingly tough questions in the official language of the passport-issuing country. Artificial intelligence software monitors physiological responses through the sensor."
>>> Law Enforcement, Military, Applications, Industry Statistics
-> back to headlines

December 4, 2005: The Wi-Fi Wizard - Soon consumers will carry devices that sense their location and tell them what's available to buy. So says Northwestern expert Kristian Hammond, co-inventor of 'intelligent' software called Watson. By Jon Van. Chicago Tribune. "Q: As consumer products gain more computer intelligence, how ill they change? A: Three trends are at work. Wi-Fi connects our portable devices at tremendous speeds. These devices sense where you are, so you get media associated with that location. All products are getting radio frequency ID tags. ... Q: How does computer intelligence come into this? A: It's all about systems anticipating your needs. The location-based capabilities [of the device] act as sensors, figuring out where you are, what you're doing. Artificial intelligence says: given this, what might you need? It gets information to people based on the context of their activity. The Watson software does that with computers. ... Q: So in the near future, we'll carry machines that know more about what we want than we do? ... Q: Does this raise privacy concerns? ..."
>>> Agents, Interfaces, Systems, Telecommunications, Marketing, Applications, Ethical & Social Implications, Interviews
-> back to headlines

December 3, 2005: Smart toys. By Jano Gibson. The Sydney Morning Herald. "All of these toys are part of a generation of playthings known as 'smart toys'. Built with every conceivable piece of electronic gadgetry - from voice recognition and animatronics to infra-red vision and artificial intelligence - it would seem these toys can do everything except drive the kids to school. As the hype over intelligent toys cranks up, some experts are raising concerns about the impact such toys are having on childhood development. Far from believing toys with pre-programmed personalities are making kids smarter, critics argue that smart toys are actually dumbing down playtime. Yet parents don't appear to be worried about any potential fallout in the development of their children if sales of smart toys are anything to go by. According to toy market research company GfK Australia, parents are spending record amounts on electronic and interactive toys with sales this year already hitting $51 million, a 97 per cent leap on last year. ... [Judy] Shackelford is the inventor of one of the smart-toy generation's most successful products, the Amazing interactive doll series, of which Amazing Amanda is the latest and most sophisticated. Designed for little girls who like playing 'pretend mummy', Amanda has many high-tech gizmos. She can differentiate between her mummy's' voice and someone else's. She knows when it's night or day. And, like real-life toddlers, she knows how to get her own way. ... So are there any educational benefits associated with smart toys? Professor Nicola Yelland, of the School of Education at Victoria University, believes the interactive elements of smart toys have some use in childhood development. 'The more interactive they are in having speech capacity and other bells and whistles, the more they stimulate multi-modal activity, like gestural, audio and tactile. The more you stimulate all of them, the more learning you get,' Yelland says."
>>> Toys, Applications, Education, Ethical & Social Implications, Industry Statistics
-> back to headlines

December 3, 2005: Virtual fitness trainer gets pulses racing. By Bennett Daviss. New Scientist (Issue 2528; subscription req'd.). "She's attractive, charming, encouraging and always there for you - get ready for a new reason to get in shape. ... I'm not about to run off with a software character. But, as I chat with her about my weekly exercise regimen, I am strangely engaged in the conversation. And a few people have certainly lost all rational perspective on meeting Laura. 'We had someone actually say they felt Laura liked them,' says Rosalind Picard, one of Laura's creators. 'That was really bizarre.' Bizarre, maybe, but gratifying. Picard, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's renowned Media Lab, is one of a group of researchers pioneering 'affective computing', an attempt to design software that can recognise and align with their users' emotional states.
>>> Emotion, Interfaces; also see this related article
-> back to headlines

December 2, 2005: Robots aim to explore and build on other worlds. By Maggie McKee. NewScientist.com news. "NASA is offering two new $250,000 prizes to stimulate advances in the use of robots in planetary exploration and automated construction. One, called the Telerobotic Construction Challenge, aims to promote the development of semi-autonomous robots that can build complicated structures with minimal remote guidance from human controllers. The challenge will require robots to assemble structures out of building blocks strewn around an arena. ... The other competition will award funding to teams that build an uncrewed, auto-piloted plane that can follow a complex flight path using only visual cues for navigation. The vehicle must also be able to 'extend and retract' a probe that can hit several targets on the ground. Called the Planetary Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Challenge.... The rules for both competitions have yet to be finalised, but both are scheduled to begin in 2007."
>>> Robots, Space Exploration, Autonomous Vehicles, Applications, Competitions (@ Resources for Students)
-> back to headlines

December 2, 2005: Robotic butlers sweep the floor at show. By Will Knight. NewScientist.com news. "Robotic butlers and household helpers have gone on show alongside more conventional industrial machines at the world's largest robot show in Tokyo, Japan. Among the hundreds of robots at the 2005 International Robot Exhibition, which ends on Saturday, are several designed to help relieve people of dull, everyday chores."
>>> Robots, Household Appliances, Manufacturing, Applications, Events (@ Resources for Students)
-> back to headlines

December 1, 2005: Free the slaves from the webmasters. Financial Times / FT.com. "The advent of page ranking, for which Google deserves much of the credit, marked chapter three and the beginning of modern search. ... But, as Mr [Bradley] Horowitz points out, the hierarchy is decided by webmasters, the controllers of website content: 'The webmasters get to vote by proxy on what's important to all of us; they cast everyone's vote, so we are slaves to the webmaster's idea of what is important.' He goes on: 'This next phase of personal and social search means that we will empower individuals with the privilege of voting on what's important for them and expose that so communities and social networks and other groups can leverage that information. The intention is to base social search on open standards in order to spread its influence beyond the Yahoo environment.' It smacks a little of 'expert systems' ideas, prevalent in the 1990s, where the knowledge and expertise of individuals would be captured and stored in a computer and retrieved on demand. Mr Horowitz agrees that many of the artificial intelligence specialists behind expert systems are now working on social search."
>>> Information Retrieval, Expert Systems, Applications
-> back to headlines

December 1, 2005: Online games powered by serious technology. By Rosie Lombardi. ITWorld Canada. "To the players it is fun and games, but there's a great deal of very complex 'behind-the-scenes' technology at work in today's global online gaming environment. The network architecture for online gaming is growing increasingly sophisticated as the genre evolves. Industry observers note that in just a few decades, games have moved light-years away from gobbling pacmans and primitive graphics. Today, they say, games like Everquest and Ultima employ artificial intelligence and complex client-server systems to enable their millions of subscribers to role-play in massively multiplayer online (MMO) environments."
>>> Video Games, Applications
-> back to headlines

December 1, 2005: Toy soldiers - Games have always prepared young people for war but should we be concerned about the increasingly explicit links between digital gaming and the military? By Pat Kane. The Guardian. "As the situation in Iraq gets bloodier and more uncontrollable, who would take on the task of promoting the idea of enlistment to America's youth? Step forward Colonel Casey Wardynski, who is deploying perhaps the most cost-effective recruitment method presently available to the US army - a war game. ... And people are playing: 29 million have grabbed a copy, and there are 6.1 million active users. ... So is the marriage of war and games inevitable? After all, humans play games for wonderful, enriching reasons - and sometimes for no reason at all. But they have always played games to prepare for war. Some of our earliest and most enduring board games, such as chess and Go, began as teaching tools for the children of kings and emperors. Through such games they understood strategy, imagined the battlefield and saw the consequences of attack and defence. ... Computer games, like any hi-tech industry, have roots in military technology: there is a direct line from the first air force radar screen to today's pixellated hyper-real images. The first videogames were made in the 50s and 60s, by scientists at Massachuset's Institute of Technology funded by the Department of Defence. ... So why is the US computer games industry, as compared to, say, music, movies or television, so explicitly gung-ho? ... "
>>> Ethical & Social Implications, Video Games, Military, Chess, Go, Games & Puzzles, History, Applications
-> back to headlines

December 2005: The Science of Pseudoscience - In a new, Web-only column, journalist David Kushner takes a look behind the scenes at how science is portrayed in movies and television, starting with the role played by the technical advisor. IEEE Spectrum Online. "The representation of science on film has not been without its critics over the years. David A. Kirby, who studies science communication at the University of Manchester, in England, cites the U.S. National Science Foundation's 'Science and Engineering Indicators 2000' report, which criticized the so-called information pollution of fictional science, confused by the public as fact. ... The Star Trek series has ... become a model for collaboration between science fact and fiction, or as [Andre] Bormanis puts it, the resulting 'pseudoscience.' The goal is to create a plausible set of rules behind even the most unruly science fantasy. ... While it's hard to find a full-time job as a science advisor, there are opportunities for those interested in pursuing this on the side."
>>> Science Fiction
> back to headlines

December 2005: Fear, Inc. - How homeland security became the biggest market opportunity since the dotcom boom. By Evan Ratliff. Wired (Issue 13.12). "A decade ago, optimism about how technology would connect the planet, reinvent commerce, and revolutionize society gave rise to the dotcom boom. When optimism turned into fevered speculation, the economy crashed. Now another mania is taking hold. It's predicated on fear and funded by a drive to defend against, prepare for, and recover from perils both man-made and natural, real and imagined. For every nightmare scenario - a nuclear weapon in a shipping container, a suicide bomber in the subway, an avian flu pandemic, another killer hurricane - there are entrepreneurs and venture capitalists and consultants promising to help. And the government is ready to spend money to confront these problems - or at least to look like it's doing so. ... Businesses from small tech startups to huge defense contractors are selling everything from biometrics and data backup to cryptography, vaccines, and every type of WMD sensor or explosive sniffer imaginable. Unsettling times are boom times. The government is spending billions of dollars subsidizing R&D; for technologies that both threaten privacy, like video surveillance and data mining, and those that protect it, like encryption, network security, and anonymization applications."
>>> Law Enforcement, Military, Machine Learning, Vision, Applications, Ethical & Social Implications, Industry Statistics
-> back to headlines

NOVEMBER 2005

November 30, 2005: Interview with Dr. Timothy Tuttle, CEO of Video Search Company, Truveo. By Tracy Swedlow. Interactive TV Today [itvt] Bloggit. "Tuttle recently spoke to [itvt]'s Tracy Swedlow about why Truveo believes its technology's ability to crawl dynamic Web sites gives it a crucial advantage in the video search space, about the company's business model, about how its technology attempts to 'look' at Web sites in the same way that a person would, and more. ... Tuttle: ... You see, the big problem with video search--and everyone in the industry knows this--is that while search works great for Web pages, it's a much harder problem to find and index videos on the Web. The reason it's so hard is that it's very difficult for the typical crawling technologies to even see the video on the Web. If they go to a Web site and try to find the video, it's very hard for them to do that. ... [itvt]: How does your technology attempt to 'see' the visual characteristics of a Web page? Tuttle: What we try to look at is the rendered and instantiated version of a functioning Web application. Think of it as similar to looking at the screen buffer. We're looking at a screen shot, as it were, of the rendered page, in order to see if there's a section of that page that may have video playing. And also to look around it, to see if there's any other information that's displayed that relates to that video. ... [itvt]: Is Truveo interested in artificial intelligence technologies that would allow searches of visual content directly--i.e. searches of images themselves? Tuttle: We have a bunch of Ph.D's here who've spent a lot of time either working in research labs or universities on technologies for things like video metadata extraction. There are lots of techniques that are being researched right now. Frankly, people have been working on things like image analysis, object recognition, and scene detection for the past 15 years. I definitely think there is hope that those technologies might be useful in the future for doing automated analysis of images, and then--potentially--video. ... One of the techniques that a lot of the search companies are focused on right now--including us--is using technologies like voice recognition, in order to do a better job of extracting metadata from a video file.
>>> Information Retrieval, Web-Searching Agents, Image Understanding, Speech, Natural Language Processing, Applications, Agents, Vision, Machine Learning, Interviews
-> back to headlines

November 30, 2005: The right stuff - With a boost from NASA, Hellgate Elementary kids expand their knowledge. By Rob Chaney. Missoulian. "Getting kids to stay after school to do extra work sounds about as easy as putting a man on the moon, right? Thanks to a dedicated group of parents, teachers and NASA rocket scientists, it's a regular event at Hellgate Elementary School. At the only school district in Montana designated a NASA Explorer School, Hellgate Elementary students are skipping bus rides home to build robots, check moon positions and stretch the boundaries of their classroom education. ... After school Tuesday, a dozen fifth- and sixth-graders in the Hellgate Elementary Robotics Club were hard at their task of programming robot cars to accomplish a set of tasks far more complicated than programming a VCR. Using Lego Mindstorm kits, half of the the children set up obstacles and challenges on a big floor map. The other half crowded around computers, working out the software the robots must follow to complete their tasks."
>>> Summer Camps, Courses Programs & more (@ Resources for Students), Resources for Educators, Robots
-> back to headlines

November 30, 2005: 'Robot women' of U of M reach out to girls, students of color. By Bob San. Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. "When Monica Anderson and fellow University of Minnesota students Kelly Cannon and Katie Panciera go shopping, they are reluctant to tell the salespeople what they major in. The three are studying for their doctoral degrees in the university's Computer Science and Engineering Department's Center for Distributed Robotics. In short, they study robots. 'We get that look when we tell them we study robots,' said Anderson. ... Anderson, Cannon and Panciera are studying and designing software for intelligent robots that can do surveillance work for humans. 'The idea is to keep people out of danger and save lives,' Anderson explained. 'They can be used to search for people in natural disasters, in collapsed buildings, and to search for bombs.' ... Anderson feels that women can offer different perspectives to the field of engineering and science research. ... Anderson, Cannon and Panciera are doing something extra to help more women and minorities into science and technology. Cannon ran a Minnesota Technology Day Camp for 15 middle school students this past summer. For five days, Cannon, Anderson, Panciera and other U of M students gave these students an insight into the world of robotics. ... 'Lots of girls think people studying computer science are antisocial, quiet and nerdy,' Cannon said. 'I want to show them that we are nice, normal people who do normal things.'"

• Also see: Beyond Gender - A look at majors where women are the minority. By Natalie Naylor. The Utah Statesman Online (November 30, 2005). " Vicki Allan, an associate professor in computer science at USU, said about 10 percent of all graduates in computer science at USU are female. 'They are some of our very very best students,' Allan said. However, she said she is concerned at the low number of women in computer science - below the national average of about 17 percent female graduates. Allan said women are more than capable of being successful in computer science, bringing up the point that more than half of the math majors at USU are female. ... Allan doesn't know why so few women go into computer science, but she speculates that it is because computer science is viewed as 'nerdy' or is not as prestigious as other areas of study. When, in reality, she said the job market is good for computer scientists and they are at the top of the pay scale. ... 'SWE [Society of Women Engineers] is just a good organization so women can understand what career opportunities they have,' [Heather] Warren said. "... [Divya] Pillai is the vice president for the USU chapter of ACM-W, the Association of Computing Machinery for Women, an association that celebrates, informs and supports women in computing."

>>> Equality & Diversity and Academic Departments and Summer Camps and Associations (@ Resources for Students), Hazards & Disasters, Robots, Applications
-> back to headlines

November 30, 2005: Carleton students win scholarships for robotics research. Ottawa Citizen (subscription req'd.). "Two Carleton University graduate students have won $7,500 scholarships in a program that promotes research into robots and other forms of intelligent systems. ... 'We are committed to creating job opportunities for highly-skilled Canadians right here at home, and these funds will go a long way in helping to address Canada's 'brain drain' and skills shortage challenges,' [Precarn Inc.president Paul Johnston] said."
>>> Robots, Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students)
-> back to headlines

November 30, 2005: A model evacuation. The Engineer Online. "[Judith] Holt and Keith Christensen, with Utah State University's Center for Persons with Disabilities, are researching how well accommodations for getting disabled people into buildings work when lots of people are trying to get out. ... 'The main problem with this study is that you can't practice with people,' says Christensen. “You can't put 10,000 people in a stadium, declare an emergency, and then watch what happens. Getting large groups out of a building fast can't be studied in real time with real people.' ... The research uses a method called 'agent-based modelling,' which creates thousands of individual computer people, or agents, each with their own tendencies and behaviours, such as how fast they move, whether they will follow a crowd or not, how they perceive exits, and their aversion to narrow hallways. Some of these agents are programmed with disabilities, and their exits are watched especially closely."
>>> Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, Social Science, Applications
-> back to headlines

November 29, 2005: LEGO team heads to competition. By Emily Quirk. Exeter News-Letter via Seacoast Online. "Stratham Memorial School's LEGO League teams are building future engineers. Although the school has three teams, it's the Wild Wacky Wolves all-girls team that will be traveling to Nashua on Saturday for the 2005 Granite State FIRST LEGO League Official Tournament. This is the first Stratham team to go to the state championship. The FIRST LEGO League, considered the 'little league' of U.S. FIRST Robotics, is for children ages 9 to 14. Youngsters build robots designed for their age group and gain hands-on experience in engineering and computer programming."
>>> Competitions (@ Resources for Students), Resources for Educators, Robots
-> back to headlines

November 29, 2005: 16 hands, 1 cyber glove. Eight Traverse City teens win an MIT grant for young inventors. By Susan Ager. Detroit Free Press. "Last month, the Traverse City teens got an $8,000 grant from one of America's top universities to develop a prototype of an invention the team is calling, for now, a 'mouse-glove.' ... The team is one of 18 in the nation awarded grants of up to $10,000 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this year. The Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams program is intended to excite, empower and encourage high school students in creative science. ... InvenTeam grants have, in the past four years, gone to teams proposing an eclectic mix of inventions, including a portable device to test the ripeness of watermelons. Last year, the only other Michigan team to win a grant, a group in in Saginaw, worked on a robot that stripes or re-stripes athletic fields. Whether these inventions are ever marketed is irrelevant."

• Sidebar by Susan Ager: "The Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams program has awarded grants to 44 high-school teams to work on inventions like these: A robot that would collect from a tennis court up to 20 balls at once. ..."

>>> Applications, Resources for Students, Resources for Educators
-> back to headlines

November 29, 2005: Science-and-religion pioneers still active - The Institute for Theological Encounter with Science and Technology addresses the religious implications of science. By Anne Reilly. Science & Theology News. "Advances in science and technology have resulted in a growing interest in their ethical and religious implications. The Institute for Theological Encounter with Science and Technology in St. Louis. has engaged the community in weighing science and its results since 1968. ... With an emphasis on the Christian perspective, the group discusses topics such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, globalization and genetics. ... The institute publishes multiple science-and-religion resources, including a quarterly bulletin and books compiling information from their workshops. The most recent publication is Computers, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality."
>>> Ethical & Social Implications
-> back to headlines

November 29, 2005: Pentagon's Urban Recon Takes Wing. By John Hudson. Wired News. "A leading defense contractor has successfully demonstrated a system that lets foot soldiers command unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, to see real-time overhead images on their handheld computers while fighting in urban battle zones. Individual war fighters can receive video-surveillance data on a target of interest by moving a cursor over the subject, as part of a Northrop Grumman system to automate reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition, or RSTA, within urban environments. ... For the demo, a soldier observed a distant garage with a van backing out of it, and selected this target on his handheld screen. HURT [Heterogeneous Urban RSTA ] autonomously selected the best UAV for the job based on location, and dispatched it to 'shadow' the van. It also re-tasked the remaining three aerial units to secure a wide-area perimeter. 'This is truly the system of systems,' said Jim Hart, a spokesman for Northrop Grumman."
>>> Law Enforcement, Military, Autonomous Vehicles, Applications
-> back to headlines

November 29, 2005: The cyber sleuth - DePaul computer scientist develops system to help Chicago Police Department solve serial crimes. By Patrice M. Jones. Chicago Tribune. "A veteran DePaul University computer scientist, [Tom] Muscarello has been working since the mid-1990s on perfecting an artificial intelligence system that is aimed at helping the Chicago Police Department blaze a bold new trail in the way it solves serial robberies, rapes and other violent crimes. And he just might have hit pay dirt. The computer system, called the Classification System for Serial Criminal Patterns (CSSCP), is expected to begin live trials at the Chicago Police Department as soon as early next year. ... 'We decided to try to build a system that is intelligent enough to do what the best detectives are already doing,' said Muscarello, who explored the techniques of six top Chicago detectives during the initial stages of the study."
>>> Law Enforcement, Applications; also see this related article
-> back to headlines

November 29, 2005: It's life, but not as we know it. By Beverley Head. The Sydney Morning Herald. "Ten years ago it took an hour to fly from Melbourne to Sydney. Now it's an hour and a half. 'That's not because the planes got slower, it's because of air-traffic control,' says Professor Peter Lindsay, director of the Australian Research Council's Centre for Complex Systems. He believes that if aircraft can be made to flock, similar to birds, it would drastically improve air-traffic management. Professor Lindsay, who holds the Boeing chair of systems engineering at the University of Queensland, is one of a growing number of computer scientists using the real world as muse and laboratory. They are forming multidisciplinary teams to look into how complex systems such as networks and traffic management are tackled in the real world. It is hoped that industry - which shows little interest in the science - will use the findings to make new computer systems that solve highly complex problems. 'We're looking at how birds flock through swarm analysis,' Professor Lindsay says. 'The artificial-life people have a good idea of how they do it. This will help develop a new model for air-traffic management.' ... A key aspect of these emerging complex IT systems is how much they borrow from nature. ... Complex IT systems are distinguished by their ability to evolve, to almost take on a life of their own. Just as genetic algorithms are modified with each incarnation an improvement over previous generations, neural networks adapt by learning from real-world examples - simple nanobots organise themselves, each following a simple set of rules that combine to generate a complex activity. ... 'Many areas of advanced computing are almost indistinguishable from biology,' says Professor David Green, a Monash University researcher and a chief investigator with the Centre for Complex Systems. 'Nature is so complex and has produced many ways of solving complex problems. We can learn from them,' says Professor Green. ... Professor of IT research at Monash University David Green and his colleague Tania Bransden have used swarm analysis techniques to predict social outcomes."
>>> Artificial Life, Multi-Agent Systems, Machine Learning, Genetic Algorithm, Neural Networks, Transportation, Social Science, Applications, Agents
-> back to headlines

November 29, 2005: Missile system ignites cancer detection. By Jennifer Foreshew. Australian IT / The Australian. "An Australian international authority on artificial intelligence is using missile guidance technology to create a device capable of cancer detection. ... Applying artificial intelligence to cancer scanning technology enabled body cells to be viewed with a higher degree of precision, helping to reduce the margin for error when studying fluctuations in body metabolism. 'This is all about early detection,' Dr Khoshnevisan said."
>>> Medicine, Applications
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November 28, 2005: News in A Flash - Army of robots hits campus. By Chloé Fedio & Jake Troughton. The Gateway. "A group of 30 school kids were on [the University of Alberta] campus this Saturday building robots with the help of engineering students. David Kastelan, an engineering student and member of the Autonomous Robotic Vehicle Project (ARVP), which put on the event, worked with other members of his group on the robot kits before the kids, aged ten to 15, took up the task. ... 'Robots can do cool things that humans can't; like, if they have to go clean up a nuclear accident, they can, but humans can't, 'cause they could get sick, like in Chernobyl,' [12 year old Stephan Soucy] said. Soucy, like all the kids at the event, submitted an essay to the Edmonton Journal about his interest in robots and was chosen to take part in the building process. 'Some day they might take over, who knows,' the seventh-grader warned. Still, he says he hopes to pursue a career in robotics."
>>> Summer Camps, Courses Programs & more and Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students), Hazards & Disasters, Robots, Applications, Ethical & Social Implications
-> back to headlines

November 28, 2005: Artifical Intelligence Promises Major Advance in E&P; Technology. By John A. Sullivan. Natural Gas Week (subscription req'd.). "In just a few years, an operator sitting at a console in Houston will be able to monitor oil and gas wells around the world, whether they are off the coast of Nigeria, in the middle of a jungle -- or even in the Arctic. It's not the stuff of science fiction, but a concept called the intelligent oilfield, now being developed by IBM through a partnership with the energy industry."
>>> Petroleum Industry, Applications, Interfaces
-> back to headlines

November 28, 2005: Out of the ashes... Wessex Scene Online. "On 8th December 2002, Edinburgh University's School of Informatics and its Artificial Intelligence Library were partially destroyed by a fire, which started in a nightclub and ripped through Edinburgh’s Old Town. Like Southampton's School of ECS, Edinburgh was a world-leader for research and teaching and over forty-years' worth of work was lost in the blaze. £1.2 million worth of computer equipment, over 1000 PhD theses and Masters' dissertations and 30,000 reports were destroyed. ... In September this year, £42 million was pledged to the department to construct a new building which would house the School of Informatics, with work starting last month."
>>> also see these related articles
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November 27, 2005: Pardon Me, but the Art Is Mouthing Off. By Jori Finkel. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "It was late in the day, rain was streaking the windows of a converted warehouse in San Francisco and the robot was not behaving. Represented by a talking head on a flat-screen monitor, and equipped with voice-recognition software, the artificial intelligence computer -- known as DiNA -- was designed to chat with visitors about current affairs. She is supposed to be a political animal, or more precisely, machine. ... The next day, relaxing on a brown couch in her studio, Ms. [Lynn] Hershman Leeson talked about what it was like to be an artist forever bumping up against the limits of technology. 'I'm always trying to do something that doesn't exist yet,' she said. "Voice recognition for DiNA, for example - everyone said that we couldn't do it, that the technology wasn't far enough along. But I've learned over the years that you can never stop at the first no.' ... For more than 30 years, she has made artwork across many platforms - from painting, photography and performance art to video, laserdisc, DVD, Web-based work and interactive sculpture. She has also made two feature-length films: 'Conceiving Ada,' in 1997, and 'Teknolust,' in 2002. Like the rest of her work, they explore mind-bending questions about reality and identity. How can we tell in an age of digital and genetic sampling what is real? Can another mode of existence become more real or powerful than ours? Does a robot have its own personality? ... Both of her movies, which won awards on the film festival circuit, are feminist sci-fi adventures. 'Conceiving Ada' is a fantasy about bringing Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's brilliant daughter, back to life through computer programming - the language she helped to invent. 'Teknolust' tells the story of a geeky female biogeneticist who uses her own DNA to create three computer-bred clones...."
>>> Art, Natural Language Processing, Robots, Philosophy, Ethical & Social Implications, Science Fiction, Ada @ Namesakes
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November 27, 2005: Going to Boston. By Sam Nejame. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "Where to stay ... Following a $2 million renovation in 2004, the preciously named Hotel@MIT, 20 Sidney Street, Cambridge, (617) 577-0200, started aggressively courting the high-tech crowd. There are robots from M.I.T.'s Artificial Intelligence Lab in the lobby...."
>>> Robots
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November 25, 2005: Bennettsville book fair promotes literacy. By Shireese M. Bell. Morning News Online. "[T]wo Bennettsville natives, CDF Founder Marian Wright Edelman ... and Karina Liles, a junior Spelman College student, a member of the Spelbots RoboCup Soccer Team, attended the [Children's Defense Fund's annual book fair]. ... Liles demonstrated Sony's ERS-7 AIBO Robot Dog. ... Liles said her professor Dr. Andrew Williams, who specializes in robotics and artificial intelligence, came up with the idea of forming a robotics team. She said the team started last year and had the opportunity to compete in the International RoBoCup 2005 Four-Legged Robot Soccer competition in Osaka, Japan, this past summer. The team was formed to provide hands-on robotics training and research for female computer science students and promote technology. Out of 24 teams, Spelman was the first and only historically black college and university and the only U.S. undergraduate school to qualify."
>>> Competitions (@ Resources for Students), Robots; also see this related article
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November 25 - December 1, 2005: Pass the Paddles - Man's Best Friend. Nintendogs - machines, metaphysics, and you. By Joshuah Bearman. LA Weekly. "Computers were still huge assemblies of vacuum tubes and transistors when the German-Jewish émigré and computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum published a paper called 'ELIZA --- A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine,' in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 9. It was 1966, and Weizenbaum programmed ELIZA to simulate the 'active listening' psychoanalytical strategies of the Rogerian therapy in vogue at the time. ... ELIZA struck a deep chord: It was the first simulated intelligence, and already presented the possibility of people having an emotional relationship with a computer. That raised the issue, since taken up by computer scientists and philosophers and cyberpunk novelists and eager post-humanists: What do such relationships mean? ... Today, the saga further unfolds with the Nintendogs phenomenon. That,s a form of computer intelligence running on that experimental platform, the Nintendo DS, a hand-held game system far less advanced than the theoretical HAL 9000 but still powerful enough to let you walk around with a bunch of simulated beings living in your pocket. Yes: virtual pets. ... Nintendogs go a long way toward satisfying a sort of canine Turing test: If they look and act enough like dogs, then at a simple cognitive level, they're a pretty good substitute. ... Nintendogs moves beyond the interpersonal, and instead facilitates bonding with the software itself."
>>> Video Games, Chatbots (@ Natural Language Processing), History, Ethical & Social Implications, Science Fiction, Turing Test, Applications
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November 23, 2005: E-Europe awards. The Guardian. "The eEurope awards, organised by the European Institute of Public Administration, recognise innovaton in e-government and healthcare in the EU and Efta countries. We pick out some of the 52 finalists. ... Fighting fraud (Italy): Italian customs officers are fighting fraud with an artificial intelligence system called Falstaff: a fully automated logical system against forgery and fraud. (www.agenziadogane.it)"
>>> Fraud Detection & Prevention, Applications
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November 23, 2005: A cyborg explores what it means to be human - What does it mean to be a human? A cyborg and a professor weigh in on the discussion. By Seth Glick. Science & Theology News. "When 40-year-old Michael Chorost decided to get a cochlear implant, a device that uses a computer chip implanted in the brain to process auditory signals, he knew it would change the way he would perceive sound --- and the way he would perceive himself. A self-described science-fiction nerd, Chorost was intrigued by the fact that the surgery would designate him a 'cyborg,' a term used to describe a person whose physiological processes are aided by electrical devices. ... While Chorost approaches the definition of 'human' from a unique perspective, he said he's just one of many to weigh in on the issue. '"Human," for me, is an assignation that is purely value-free. That’s just a biological description. It's a descriptive term, while 'person' is a value-based term,' said Anne Foerst, a visiting professor of theology and computer science at St. Bonaventure University in New York and a former theological advisor to the robotics lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. 'Human' and 'cyborg,' Foerst said, belong in the same category because neither word implies the value of humanness. On the other hand, she said 'personhood' is not something that can be empirically proven. It must be assigned. She defines 'personhood' as the active or passive participation in the human construction of stories about one another. ... She said the main fear is one of comparison: Humans resist being compared to machines and animals because they need to feel they are superior."

• Also from Science & Theology News: I, robot? Ethical considerations of cyborgs Professors on both sides of the Atlantic examine the ethics of becoming part man, part machine. By William Jamara. November 23, 2005. "The term 'cyborg' comes from the merging of the words 'cybernetic' and 'organism.' ... Kevin Warwick, a cybernetics professor at the University of Reading, England, and himself a so-called cyborg, has been studying the ethical concerns raised by the notion of being part man, part machine. In August 1998, Warwick had a silicon chip transponder inserted into his forearm. ... Warwick writes that in a brain with both mechanical and human parts the 'epicenter of moral and ethical decision making is no longer of purely human form but rather it is of a mixed human, machine base.' Chris Crittenden, an ethics professor at the University of Maine at Machias has also researched what effect cyborgs might have on humanity. Crittenden said cyborgs may provoke humanity to engage in what he calls 'self-deselection' --- the idea that in replacing parts of our bodies with mechanical devices we will essentially be replacing ourselves with another species."

>>> Philosophy, Ethical & Social Implications, Assisitve Technologies, Robots
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November 22, 2005: Video Games Are Their Major, So Don't Call Them Slackers. By Seth Schiesel. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "Three decades after bursting into pool halls and living rooms, video games are taking a place in academia. ... Traditionalists in both education and the video game industry pooh-pooh the trend, calling it a bald bid by colleges to cash in on a fad. But others believe that video games - which already rival movie tickets in sales - are poised to become one of the dominant media of the new century. ... According to the International Game Developers Association, fewer than a dozen North American universities offered game-related programs five years ago. Now, that figure is more than 100, with dozens more overseas. ... 'The skills and methods of video games are becoming a part of our life and culture in so many ways that it is impossible to ignore,' said Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator who is now president of the New School, which includes Parsons. Parsons has offered game courses to graduate students for five years and this fall began an undergraduate program in game design. 'But if you just look at the surface of people playing games, you are missing the point, which is that games are all about managing and manipulating information,' Mr. Kerrey said. 'A lot of students that come out of this program may not go to work for Electronic Arts. They may go to Wall Street. Because to me, there is no significant difference -- except for clothing preference -- between people who are making games and people who are manipulating huge database systems to try to figure out where the markets are headed. It's largely the same skill set, the critical thinking. Games are becoming a major part of our lives, and there is actually good news in that.' ... Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the game developers' association, said that no firm figures were available for overall employment in the industry. But at bellwether Electronic Arts, employment has almost doubled since 2000, to roughly 6,450. Over the same period, the number of employees in Electronic Arts's creative operations - the people who actually make games - has almost tripled, to 4,300. At universities that have embraced video games, the curriculum varies. ... "
>>> AI Courses and Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students), Video Games, Software Development
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November 21, 2005: Neat package takes gamers to the next level. By Matthew Yi. San Francisco Chronicle & SFGate.com. "The differences in the new Xbox 360 from its predecessor are not only on the outside, but under the hood. The central processing unit, the brains of the system, is a chip package containing three cores, each running at 3.2 GHz. The graphics chip is a custom processor from ATI Technologies that runs at 500 MHz. The result is a powerful computing system that takes graphics another step toward cinematic realism and improves artificial intelligence, which can make taking out a bad guy hiding behind a barrier more difficult."
>>> Systems, Video Games, Applications
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November 21, 2005: Computer R&D; rocks on - Recomputing the Future (first of three parts). By Rick Merritt. EE Times. "Think computers have become a commodity, like pork bellies, and computer science an old set of solved problems? Think again. The computer research agenda is as big as ever before, if not bigger. Experts see important breakthroughs and whole new fields of investigation just opening up. Advances will come in natural-language searches, machine learning, computer vision and speech-to-text, as well as new computing architectures to handle those hefty tasks. Beyond the decade mark, Edward D. Lazowska, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington, expects computers based on quantum physics.
>>> Systems, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech, Vision, Applications
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November 20, 2005: IT plan takes flight again. By Simon Bevilacqua. The Mercury / Sunday Tasmanian. "The CSIRO is promising Tasmania everything from unmanned aircraft to jobs and millions of dollars in investment. Australia's major science research organisation has bought into the embattled Intelligent Island program. ... The CSIRO was also interested in developing a unique unmanned aircraft for application in forestry and hydro power operations. The CSIRO already has Advanced Unmanned Air Vehicles like unmanned choppers which have artificial intelligence and vision systems technology that combine visible, ultra violet and infra red imaging. The vehicles also have advanced communications and navigation capabilities. 'In Europe forest and plantation management is becoming important and more highly regulated. Unmanned air vehicles monitor, manage and improve forestry productivity.' Mr [Gary] Doherty said the craft were essentially 'flying robots' and had many potential applications."
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Natural Resource Management, Applications
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November 19, 2005: Desert racers - drivers not included. By Gregory T. Huang. New Scientist (subscription req'd.; Issue 2526). "Five robotic cars have raced across 212 kilometres of treacherous desert tracks, all on their own - is it an artificial intelligence breakthrough? ... Some observers of the race have been quick to link the successes with general advances in AI research. 'It dramatically demonstrates a set of research advances in machine vision, probabilistic modelling, estimation and path planning that have evolved in laboratories and field experiments over the past decade,' says Ken Goldberg, a roboticist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the race. But others remain to be convinced that breakthroughs in AI made a real difference this time. 'The robotic road race community owes us a sound, clear and useful explanation of what, if anything, they have learned,' says Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in AI at MIT."
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Robots, Vision, Reasoning, Applications, Grand Challenges, AI Overview
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November 18, 2005: Q&A; - Bill Gates On Supercomputing, Software In Science, And More. By Aaron Ricadela. InformationWeek. "InformationWeek: ... How can Microsoft Research technology or the intellect of those people be applied to these broad problems in science, medicine, or engineering? Gates: ... Some of the people like [Eric] Horvitz and [David] Heckerman who came to Microsoft Research came--they're MDs, and they're machine learning experts. There's a technique, a Bayesian [statistical] technique, in which Heckerman or Horvitz are two of the leading people. When those guys came, we were always interested in applying machine learning to see what drugs work, and what lifestyles work, things like that. And they applied their things even to big data mining problems in business, where you say, 'OK, which are my most profitable customers, or what promotion techniques are working well?' They've taken some of their techniques against clickstreams to figure out how you should design the Web, or how searches work. ... InformationWeek: When we met back in September, we were talking about the shortage of computer science graduates in the United States, and that if that trend holds up, what it might mean for Microsoft years down the road. ... "
>>> Data Mining, Machine Learning, Applications, Computer Science, Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students), Interviews
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November 18, 2005: Japan's rise of the robots. By Richard Taylor Editor. BBC News Click Online. "Is the future really the stuff of science fiction novels, with evil robots taking over the world, or even just putting everyone out of their jobs? A different vision is emerging in Japan, with an altogether more positive outlook. How many great-grandparents do you know who wile away the days with a toy robot? ... Unlike their fictional counterparts in the West, apparently hell-bent on destruction, robots in Japan are seen as forces for good, as borne out by their role in rescue work. And because the Shinto religion ascribes a spirit even to inanimate objects, they are seen less as machines and more as human-substitutes. ... 'Looking at the big picture of robot development, it's clear that this is a pivotal moment, a time of huge change,' said Masakazu Sato, robot researcher at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. 'Robots are starting to come into home environments, not just normal environments but also in terms of welfare, to assist older people in doing activities at home.'"
>>> Assisitive Technologies, Robots, Applications, Ethical & Social Implications, Science Fiction
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November 18, 2005: Creator of autonomous vehicles visits. By Ryan Yacco. The Daily Targum. "As part of the Distinguished Lecture Series of the [Rutgers] Computer Science Department, [Sebastian] Thrun visited the Computing, Research and Education Building on Busch campus Tuesday, to discuss his recent work in the field of robotics and his visions for the future. Already a well-known figure within the field through his work at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, Thrun gained wider notoriety in October by winning the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. ... The winning vehicle incorporated seven Pentium processors, lasers, radar, cameras and a GPS into a drive-by-wire system that controlled throttle, steering, shifting gears and braking. Despite this impressive hardware setup, Thrun said, it was Stanley's internal programming that separated him from the crowd. 'We want to move away from vision-based control into more data based,' Thrun said. ... Building off of the success of Stanley, Thrun hopes to design a car capable of driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles in real traffic within two years time. 'This is a big thing,' Thrun said. 'This means that elderly people could be driving who otherwise couldn't drive anymore, and they would not become dependent and lose social relations.'"
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Robots, Transportation, Applications, Grand Challenges
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November 16, 2005: Gadget of the Week - WowWee Robosapien V2. A new and improved version of the popular robot buddy. By Wilson Rothman. TIME.com. "The original Robosapien, introduced last year, was an unexpectedly funny bionic buddy, and a runaway success: to date, 2.3 million units have been sold. The newer version comes at a higher price --- $250 instead of $100 --- but with jacked-up specs and capabilities. Twice as many motors control the limbs, digits, head and neck, and there are stereo microphones for sensing audio, while a camera detects motion and color. Mix a little of the original robot's sass with some nice new artificial intelligence, and you've got a robot that reacts to its environment or takes commands from the two-stick infrared remote."
>>> Toys, Robots, Applications
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November 16, 2005: Virtual professors draw student attention - Study suggests they could be used to confront stereotypes, too. LiveScience / available from MSNBC.com. "There's a simple reason why computers have not taken over teachers' jobs: They're boring, unpersuasive, unattractive and soulless. That may soon change if Amy Baylor can perfect the virtual professors she's working on. 'Up until now, the personal computer's potential to be a valuable teaching and learning tool has been stymied by its 'soulless' nature,' says Baylor, a professor of instructional systems at Florida State University's Research of Innovative Technologies for Learning (RITL). 'We're using computers to simulate human beings in a controlled manner so we can investigate how they affect and persuade people.' ... The characters --- Baylor calls them pedagogical agents --- will ultimately be more than just 3-D animations and voices. Software will allow them to adapt to a student's skill level in a given subject and provide feedback, both cognitive and emotional."
>>> Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Interfaces, Education, Applications
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November 16, 2005: Visionary Kurzweil Touts Technologies Of Tomorrow. By Kevin McLaughlin. CRN. "Computer visionary Ray Kurzweil examined the effects of accelerating growth of technologies on the present and future of human technological innovation during a speech at the ninth annual CRN Industry Hall of Fame, held Tuesday in Santa Clara, Calif. ... As proof that these types of evolutions will take place, Kurzweil used the example of artificial intelligence that is embedded everywhere in today's society, from medical devices such as electrocardiogram machines and credit card fraud detection software. ... '2029 is where technology really gets interesting because we'll have had all of this exponential growth taking place over the next 25 years,' said Kurzweil."
>>> Applications, The Future, Systems
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November 16, 2005: In Search of ... Smarter Information Analysis. By Stephen Swoyer. TDWI Business Intelligence News. "At this week's Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) annual meeting, members of the INFORMS data mining and artificial intelligence (AI) caucuses are expected to vote on a particularly tendentious proposition --- namely, to merge their two sections into one. ... The impetus? Smarter data mining and information analysis tools. And as business intelligence and data warehousing guru Mike Schiff points out, there's a lot of commonality between what folks like [Mary] Crissey call 'operations research' (OR) and AI. If nothing else, a lot of the insights that data mining and information analysis tools unearth can seem spooky --- even quasi-intelligent. 'Operations research is really just a superset of data mining. But it includes the statistical analysis piece, so the convergence of [OR and AI] would make sense. It definitely should be an exchange of information between the two, because basically they’re both used to solve problems,' says Schiff. ... Naturally, the convergence of data mining and AI technologies has some folks screaming Big Brother."
>>> Data Mining, Machine Learning, Applications, Ethical & Social Implications
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November 16 - 22, 2005: Artificial and Biological Intelligence. View by Subhash Kak. Ubiquity (Volume 6, Issue 42). "The recent success of several teams in meeting the $2 million DARPA Grand Challenge 2005 ... raises the question if AI might be poised for another period of high support and increased expectations. The quest for AI is also the subtext to debates outside of the field of computer science. Physics, for example, is the discovery of formal structures in nature, and each of these formal systems could be interpreted as a natural machine. The claim of some physicists that the universe itself is a giant machine is taken to complement the belief that true machine intelligence and self-awareness should arise after machine complexity has crossed a critical threshold. But this leads to certain difficulties. Since machines only follow instructions, it is not credible that they should suddenly, on account of a greater number of connections between computing units, become endowed with self-awareness. On the other hand, if one accepts that machines will never become self-aware, one may ask why is the brain-machine conscious, whereas the silicon-computer is not? ... I have considered evidence that negates the view that the brain is an ordinary machine. I argue that even with self-organization and hitherto-unknown quantum characteristics one cannot explain the capacities associated with the brain. A summary of these arguments follows. ..."

• Also see the Mailbag of comments (Ubiquity: Volume 6, Issue 44; November 29-December 5, 2005).

>>> Philosophy, Cognitive Science, Nature of Intelligence, Artificial Life
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November 15, 2005: Sega's Ambitious Plans. The Tech Beat by Olga Kharif. BusinessWeek online. "[T]he company is coming out with a new psychological thriller game, 'Condemned: Criminal Origins,' for the Xbox 360. Based on the screenshots and what Jeffery tells me about the game, it should be really neat. Characters not operated by the player are equipped with artificial intelligence, so they may act differently every time you play a level. Say, you enter a room carrying a gun. The enemy character found within might then run out of the room screaming for help. If you had entered the room unarmed, that characted might have attacked you, instead. It's this kind of neat capabilities that Sega hopes will catapult it from its current position....""
>>> Video Games, Applications
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November 15, 2005: Two Thumbs Up. By Leah Hoffmann. Forbes.com. "'Sentiment analysis,' as the field of research is known, is a hot topic among computer scientists these days. The goal is to create computer programs that can determine whether a document is positive or negative. ... Successful applications could help automate market and product research and dramatically alter the future of a simple Internet search. ... 'The variety of words that people use for subjective expressions is staggering,' says Janyce Wiebe, a professor of computer science at the University of Pittsburgh. Wiebe and her colleagues have already assembled a dictionary of some 8,000 indicator words and phrases. 'The dictionary tells you whether a word is positive or negative when it's taken out of context,' Wiebe explains. 'The challenge is to figure out whether it's positive or negative in each individual instance.' There are a number of different ways to accomplish this. ... Fast Search and Transfer ASA ... unveiled a customizable sentiment analysis program, Marketrac, last year. ... Other potential applications in the field of sentiment analysis include automated flame detectors for online bulletin boards, tracking systems for stock market reports and programs that monitor movie or product reviews."
>>> Discourse Analysis, Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Marketing, Applications
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November 15, 2005: 'Thinking' Robot Breaks Barriers but not Eggs. Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition). "At one of the venues for the APEC forum currently underway in Busan, a bartending robot is poised to make its public debut, taking orders and serving the gathered leaders -- just like a human. It is only one of various walking humanoid helper robots that have been shown around Korea, but this is the first time that such a robot has been able to carry on conversations with customers and fetch the items they request. The Ministry of Science and Technology's Intelligent Robot taskforce has created the 'T-Rot,' which is scheduled to wait on world leaders in a Robot Café at the APEC summit venue. ... The most important function is the robot's capacity to recognize things by its sense of touch. Since helper robots live with humans all the time, security is crucial. For that reason, synthetic skin which detects the texture of things like human skin is essential."
>>> Robots, Assisitive Technology, Applications
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November 15, 2005: Robo-rodent gets 'touchy-feely.' IST Results. "Robots that 'feel' objects and their texture could soon become a reality thanks to the innovative and interdisciplinary research of the AMouse, or artificial mouse, project. But even more important, perhaps, are the lessons researchers learned about robot design and artificial intelligence. The project funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies initiative of the IST programme even developed new insights into biological brain function. Researchers from Italy, Germany and Switzerland developed a 'feeling' robot by developing a new sensor modelled on hypersensitive mouse whiskers. ... In one startling outcome an AMouse robot demonstrated what appeared to be emergent behaviour: it developed a homing instinct without any pre-programming of any kind."
>>> Robots, Machine Learning, Vision, Cognitive Science
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November 15, 2005: MP spreads word on IT. By Chris Sugrue. Howick and Pakuranga Times Online. "Sixty four million people have been killed in car-related incidents since the automobile’s invention --- one reason why driving may be left to artificial intelligence in the near future. The sobering statistic was among many MP Maurice Williamson presented to the Howick and Pakuranga Grey Power Association on Friday. ... Mr Williamson cites a Massachusetts Institute of Technology prediction that by 2050, 80 per cent of what people use in their everyday life has yet to be thought of."
>>> Transportation, Applications, The Future
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November 15, 2005: Unto us the Machine is born. By Kevin Kelly. The Sydney Morning Herald [originally published in Wired: We Are the Web; Issue 13.08 - August 2005]. "The web continues to evolve from an entity ruled by mass media and mass audiences to one ruled by messy media and messy participation. How far can this frenzy of creativity go? ... What matters is the network of social creation, the community of collaborative interaction that futurist Alvin Toffler called prosumption. ... The real transformation under way is more akin to what Sun Microsystem's John Gage had in mind in 1988 when he famously said: 'The network is the computer.' His phrase sums up the destiny of the web: as the operating system for a megacomputer that encompasses the internet, all its services, all peripheral chips and affiliated devices from scanners to satellites, and the billions of human minds entangled in this global network. This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies, but our minds. ... This planet-sized computer is comparable in complexity to a human brain. Both the brain and the web have hundreds of billions of neurons, or webpages. ... Danny Hillis, a computer scientist who once claimed he wanted to make an AI 'that would be proud of me', has invented massively parallel supercomputers, in part to advance us in that direction. He now believes the first real AI will emerge not in a stand-alone supercomputer such as IBM's proposed 23-teraflop Blue Brain, but in the vast tangle of the global Machine. ... Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the web's core idea - hyperlinked pages - in 1945, but the first person to try to build on the concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson, who in 1965 envisioned his own scheme, which he called 'Xanadu'."
>>> The Future, Systems, History, Philosophy
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November 14, 2005: Airport security keeps eye on left luggage. By Anna Salleh. ABC Science Online. "A computer surveillance system that spots an abandoned suitcase at a crowded airport and sees what happened to the person who left it there is being developed. Its developers hope the system will one-day allow security staff to tell the difference between a suspicious abandoned suitcase whose owner has left the building and a suitcase whose owner is queuing for coffee two metres away. Computer vision expert, Associate Professor Massimo Piccardi of the University of Technology, Sydney and colleagues, were last week awarded an Australian Research Council grant to work with surveillance company iOmniscient, to improve the company's surveillance technology. ... 'We [will] just track them while they are walking and track the relationship with these objects that they carry,' he says. 'And we will raise an alarm only if the object is being left and the original carrier has left the area nearby.'"
>>> Law Enforcement, Vision, Applications
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November 14, 2005: Technology for technology's sake. Comment by Jon Excell. The Engineer. "Ahead of his recent visit to the US Prince Charles trotted out the somewhat tired, but occasionally persuasive argument that technology, far from being our slave, has become our master. The Prince is not alone. Many claim that the unchecked development of technology for technology's sake is one of the most pernicious influences of our age. ... If every kernel of a technological idea was subjected to a 'do we or don't we need it?' test at its embryonic stage, many advances that have made our lives fuller, safer and healthier wouldn’t be with us today. ... [W]hile it’s highly unlikely that Toyota’s i-swing will ever be seen pootling down Oxford Street, perhaps some of the technology that the car maker’s unfettered dreamers thought up will. The gyroscopic balancing and steering mechanisms and the AI system that learns your driving habits offer real hope for disabled people yearning for the open road. ... The truth of the matter is that technology is neither the problem nor the solution, it cannot be blamed for what we do with it. It is the way we actively choose to apply it that matters.
>>> Ethical & Social Implications, Applications, Transportation
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November 14, 2005: Home truths. The Engineer. "The real challenge for technologists, therefore, lies not in developing increasingly intelligent devices but in making their systems palatable and deploying them in such a way that your granny would instinctively take to them. ... [H]ow can this technology be made attractive to the average homeowner? It is a question that Roy Kalawsky, professor of human computer interaction at Loughborough University, has been studying as part of his work with the Centre for the Integrated Home Environment (CIHE). CIHE acts as an umbrella organisation that manages a portfolio of different projects based around smart homes and ubiquitous computing. Kalawsky believes that the biggest problem with home technology is that its merits are frequently obscured and let down by a confusing front end. With this in mind, Kalawsky is currently heading a project called the Smart User Interfaces trial. 'What we’re finding is that people don't want complex systems,' he said. 'No one wants to read a manual or have to work out how to operate a complicated remote control. They want something that is intuitive to use and they want to be able to personalise it; everyone wants a different way of controlling things.'"
>>> Smart Houses, Interfaces, Applications
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November 14, 2005: The Charlie Rose Show - A Discussion With Gordon Moore, Cofounder of Intel Corporation (television broadcast). "Rose: You read as I did all the concern about robotic and what, you know, Bill Joy wrote a famous piece in Wired magazine that got lots of attention, a nanotechnology and -- and robotics and - and all of that. Do you worry that technology has a place where it could - could threaten the existence of who we are? Moore: Yeah, I don't see that myself. To me, the technology is under our control and I don't think that's ever going to change. It's going to take something dramatically different than what we're doing for that to change in any case. You know, I think there are a lot of improvements we can look for. One thing that intrigued me, for example, if we ever get really good speech recognition in computers. Which I think is a matter of time, I don`t know if it's five years or 50 years, where you can talk to a computer and it will understand in context what you're saying. And if you mean t-o or t-double o for example. ... in a sentence. You get to the point where when it understands language that well, you should be able to have an intelligent conversation with your computer, should be able to ask it something in normal language and it should be able to find the answer. ... Moore: So I think, you know, that kind of level, which I would consider artificial intelligence is something that is likely to come down in the future. Not too far, maybe. Rose: Within 10 years? Moore: I have a tough time putting a time scale on it. I think 30 years ago people would have said 10 years. It's one of these ... things that keeps receding as you look at it. But I think the - you know, the - the basic capability is there, the processing power, hopefully the software will get developed to do it. It will come to pass eventually. But I still don`t see any direction in which the technology takes over, and ... Rose: We lose control. Moore: Yeah...."
>>> The Future, AI Overview, Ethical & Social Implications, Natural Language Processing, Autonomous Vehicles, Robots, Interviews
-> back to headlines

November 14, 2005: From building blocks to robots to winners - Richmond students turn Legos into a high-tech win. By Angela Mullins. Port Huron Times Herald. "Kathy Campau was introduced to Lego robotics four years ago. Not knowing what she was in for, Campau - a Richmond Middle School Spanish teacher with a flare for computers - signed up for a workshop on the subject at a technology seminar. She's been hooked ever since. ... Now, she is passing a love of the subject along to her students. The school's 22-member Lego robotics team started meeting in September. On Sunday, the group took home two trophies from a competition in Clinton Township in Macomb County. Popular at some schools locally and at many nationwide, Lego robotics is a team competition that challenges youth to build robots from Lego kits. Once the robots are assembled, the teams use computers to program them to do specific tasks. This year's theme was Ocean Odyssey...."
>>> Robots, Resources for Educators, Competitions (@ Resources for Students)
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November 14, 2005: Cellphones take on new snooping keys. By Mahalakshmi. Financial Express. "[I]f researchers from the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, are to believed, recent advances made in artificial intelligence (AI) technology will not make only present-day mobile devices more smarter, but personalised too. Their contention: Smartphones are providing value-added services through search engines. Perhaps, it is due to new trends in AI systems which are now becoming a hit among cellphone providers. ... 'In simple terms, mobile devices will tend to analyse one's behaviour as an user, and like a desktop search, get relevant answers approximately with five results,' says Vasudev Varma, assistant professor, IIIT."
>>> Telecommunications, Information Retrieval, Applications
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November 14, 2005: Think fast -- your games console is about to get a lot smarter. Media release available from Computerworld. "Soon the aliens and monsters will not only outgun you, they're likely to be outthinking you as well. That's the brave new world of artificial intelligence in gaming, a big topic for next week's Second Australiasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment in Sydney. The IE2005 conference, at the University of Technology, Sydney, is bringing together high-powered researchers from Australia and around the world to discuss how computing advances are about to revolutionise fun and games. 'Developments in computer gaming are just part of it,' said Conference Chair Dr Yusuf Pisan of UTS, whose own research is about developing characters that aren't simply the pawns of the player. 'Research in artificial intelligence and interactive entertainment is on the verge of producing whole new forms of entertainment, like interactive television and interactive stories. We're within in sight of creating interactive narratives with intelligent, AI-controlled characters. That means in not too long you could be able to buy a package that, for instance, lets you play one of the cast in your favourite soap.'"
>>> Video Games & Entertainment, Drama, Conferences (@ Resources for Students), Applications
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November 14, 2005: Supercomputers set processor pace. BBC News. "IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer has kept its position as the most powerful number cruncher in the world. Its hold on the top slot was revealed in the latest list of the Top 500 supercomputers on Earth. Blue Gene/L was top of the biannually produced list because in June 2005 it set a new world record performance of 280.6 trillion calculations per second."
>>> Systems
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November 14, 2005: The universal translator. By Tim Radford. The Guardian. "Shall nation speak unto nation? Yes, but clumsily, and through human interpreters, at least for a while. Although US scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and their German counterparts at the University of Karlsruhe have just demonstrated a 'universal translator', it's a long way from being the equal of the same device in Star Trek - which enabled our human heroes to understand Klingons and their ilk. ... Neuroscientists are still trying to figure out why a human instantly understands the profound difference in meaning of sentences such as 'Time flies like an arrow' and 'Fruit flies like a banana' ... For years, computer scientists have tried to deliver 'chatterbots' - robots that respond to natural language. Their success, so far, has been limited. In 1968, Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick dreamed up HAL, the sinister silicon voice of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey."
>>> Machine Translation, Chatterbots (@ Natural Language Processing), Applications, Science Fiction; also see these related articles
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November 14, 2005: David's delight at £1m deals. Manchester Evening News. "The group said its latest American contract would improve efficiency and reduce the cost of processing claims at a major insurance company, by scheduling jobs for 450 staff. The Finnish contract, with the country's second-largest telecoms company Elisa Corporation, is to manage the schedules of 400 technicians who install the Internet in homes and businesses. ... ServicePower, which is quoted on the stock market, employs around 110 people and sells licences for its artificial intelligence software that enables clients to schedule jobs based on skills level, geographical location and customer availability...."
>>> Scheduling, Business, Applications, Reasoning
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November 14, 2005: The Google Story - An Excerpt from David A. Vise's Book. washingtonpost.com. "Chapter 26: Googling Your Genes ... Sergey Brin and Larry Page have ambitious long-term plans for Google's expansion into the fields of biology and genetics through the fusion of science, medicine, and technology. ... 'Too few people in computer science are aware of some of the informational challenges in biology and their implications for the world,' Brin says. ... 'The ultimate search engine,' says Page, 'would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.' The critical path inside the Googleplex includes experimentation with artificial intelligence techniques and new methods of language translation. Brin and Page are hopeful that these efforts will eventually make it possible for people to have access to better information and knowledge without the limitations and barriers imposed by differences in language, location, Internet access, and the availability of electrical power. ... Google is not averse to contributing to the scientific efforts of others. It teamed up with Stanford several years ago to provide computing power for a scientific project that focused on unfolding proteins. ... ... Google's data-mining techniques appear well-suited to the formidable challenges posed by analyzing the genetic sequence. It has begun work on this project...."
>>> Bioinformatics, Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Data Mining, Applications, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning
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November 14, 2005: Now that the first race for autonomously driven vehicles has been won, attention turns to applications - Future Challenges. By Byron Spice. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Stanley might have taken home the $2 million prize awarded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, but four other robotic vehicles also completed the course through the Nevada desert without human intervention or guidance, outstripping the expectations of many observers. 'It's not a victory for a specific institution,' said Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and leader of the Stanford Racing Team. 'It was a victory for the field.' Indeed, Dr. Thrun's telephone has been ringing regularly ever since, with proposals from defense contractors, entrepreneurs and others with ideas of how to employ autonomous navigation. But so has the phone of William 'Red' Whittaker, the Carnegie Mellon University roboticist whose Red Team had the second- and third-place finishers. 'The thing we've got going for us is the success of the Grand Challenge shifted a lot of the belief state,' Dr. Whittaker said last week. ... 'There were a lot of great finishes in the Grand Challenge and that shifted a lot of things from intention to action.' Some of that interest is from the military. ... But Dr. Whittaker, whose work 20 years ago using robots in the cleanup of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident was a milestone in establishing the concept of 'field robotics,' said the interest in autonomous vehicles is much broader than that, including environmental remediation, mining and agricultural machinery. ... Dr. Thrun, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist before joining Stanford in 2003, said he has rejected proposals to develop armed vehicles under computer control, but is pursuing the convoy work. ... 'My personal take is that the biggest impact you can have is reducing the 43,000 deaths each year of people on the highways,' he said."
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Military, Transportation, Hazards & Disasters, Robots, Applications, Grand Challenges, Ethical & Social Implications
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November 13, 2005: I, for one, welcome our robot overlords - A roboticist defends his work. By Raju Mudhar. The Toronto Star (registration req'd.). "We will be the architects of our own destruction. Actually, make that engineers, since our executioner will have a metal face. Either way, it's never too late to plan for our decimation at the hands of our own technological creations, which is why the new book How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on defending yourself against the oncoming rebellion is such a revelation. The author, Daniel H. Wilson, a 27-year-old roboticist and Ph.D. student from Carnegie Mellon --- one of the leading U.S. hubs of robot-related activities (and thus an obvious hot zone for future mechanized insurrection) --- is emarking on a book tour to expound on our cold, steely fate. ... His book covers a wide range of robotics research, such as robot logic and how sensors work. Thankfully, there are also helpful tips on practical matters such as how to treat a laser wound and even how to escape from the clutches of a renegade smart home."
>>> Robots, Humor
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November 13, 2005: Are we, as science describes us, 'machines made of meat'? - The scientific rejection of dualism is hard to swallow as it diminshes people, is offensive, violates the tenets of every religion and conflicts with common sense. Editorial by Paul Bloom. Taipei Times. "The world's leading scholar on artificial intelligence once described people as machines made of meat. This nicely captures the consensus in the fields of psychology and neuroscience, which tell us that our mental lives are the products of our physical brains, and that these brains are shaped not by a divine creator, but by the blind process of natural selection. But, with the exception of a small minority of philosophers and scientists, nobody takes this view seriously. It is offensive. It violates the tenets of every religion, and it conflicts with common sense. We do not feel, after all, that we are just material bodies, mere flesh. Instead, we occupy our bodies. We own them. We are spontaneously drawn to the view defended by Rene Descartes: We are natural-born dualists, so we see bodies and souls as separate."
>>> Philosophy, Robots
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